Sunday, December 28, 2014

I
just attended a meeting of “Clergy Here And Out South” (C.H.A.O.S.), the
support group for Catholic pastors of the south shore parishes of the Diocese
Frostbite Falls. We had a very interesting presentation about the nosedive that
church attendance has taken in recent years and the disaster that is overtaking
the Frostbite Falls parochial school system. We are going to close a bunch of
schools this year and probably should have closed a lot more. In 1988 281,000
people attended Mass on Sunday here in Frostbite Falls Diocese. In 2001,
272,000 people attended Mass on Sunday. In 2014, 121,000 people attended Mass on
Sunday.That’s about 5,000 plus a year
throwing in the towel. We have been practicing “de-vangelism” while prattling
on about evangelism.

One
of the clergy at the meeting plaintively asked, “Why aren’t they coming?”I answered, “Because they don’t believe this
stuff.”I did not realize that my fellow
pastor’s question had been rhetorical. The brethren assembled looked at me as
if I had made a rude noise…. Then they continued wringing their hands.

The
question was rhetorical. My answer was sincere. The generation that knew how to
pay, pray and obey is dying like ladybugs in a hard frost. Their grandchildren
don’t have much clue what the inside of a Catholic Church looks like. They have
never heard the Gospel and when they go to Mass with grandma and hear the a
little bit of the Gospel they that think it’s rather odd: virgin births,
corpses coming back to life, gods being whipped and publicly executed, waving a
little round cracker sort of thing around.More than odd, grandma’s religion makes very little sense.

The
world they have grown up in says, “If it feels good, do it!”The church of creepy old weirdoes that
grandma attends is just the opposite: “If it feels good, you should probably
avoid it all costs.”The Church of the
Creepy Old Weirdoes can be downright nasty. It says that some people may
actually burn in hell and same-sex marriage is a bad thing, even if two people
really love each other, a woman has no right to terminate a pregnancy even if
the baby is deformed, or is really like a total bummer. They have these odd
ceremonies where they march around with round gold sunburst things with the
cracker inside it; they finger prayer beads and mumble. They sit, stand, sit,
kneel, for about an hour service during which they have to listen to some old
man in a full length skirt drone on and on about some guy who died 2,000 years
ago or maybe drone on and on about politics. The whole thing starts out with
the guy in the full length skirt kissing this stone table up in front.

Says
the young modern, “When I asked grandma what he was doing, she said, "He’s
kissing the relic in the altar." I asked her, “What’s a relic?” She said,
“It’s a piece of a dead guy’s bone or skin or something.” I said, “Eeewww…
GROSS! I’m waiting outside.”

They
don’t believe any of this stuff, and frankly, it is all rather implausible. Why
should they believe it? The only good reason to believe it is because it’s
true.

We
the clergy have not really been treating it like it’s true since sometime in
the mid-sixties. For some reason, we the clergy decided doctrinal truth wasn’t
that important. Recognizing the basic goodness of humanity was far more
important than a tedious insistence on truth. It became somehow impolite to
tell people that we were right and they were wrong. Above all it was impolite
to even hint that if they lived a certain way they might burn in hell for
eternity.

I
suspect that we had become obsessed with being polite because we had just
staggered out of the Great World War, Act I and Act II with its predictable
epilogues, the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam. The 20th century was a very
impolite century, and we decided that perhaps it would be better to be polite
for a while and not tell people that they were living in sin and just might go
to hell.

Now
we are re-doing an old play called “The War between Islam and Christendom” and
we just can’t seem to shake this politeness thing. We hear daily reports of
people cutting off other peoples’ heads and we just can’t bring ourselves to
say that if a religion tells them to do that, it probably is not such a good
religion and they should drop it like a bad habit. (I can hear you say, “What
about all those people the Catholics burned at the stake in the olden
days?“When you meet the unbelievers,
strike the necks…” Quran 47:4.The
prophet who gave us the Quran himself seems to have lopped off quite a few
heads.

Jesus
never told us to burn anyone at the stake. We decided to do that on our own
initiative. It was never part of our religion and I suspect that Jesus is going
to be rather hard on those who decided to do such things in His name since He
never asked them to do it.

In
short, we the clergy took grandma’s faith for granted.We didn’t explain it very well to her
children, and they didn’t even bother to push the issue with the grandchildren.
Now they don’t believe it. We just sort of assumed it would rub off on them.

So
what do we do? (By we, I mean myself, my fellow clergy and those who are in the
business of religion.)Step 1: Ask
ourselves if we really believe this stuff.If the honest answer is “Virgin birth, resurrection, the hope of heaven,
bread becoming flesh and blood? I guess I’m not sure I really believe it all.”
We have to take stock of where our life is. We are living a lie. (Those who are
believers will ask, “How can this be? A priest who goes to the altar every day
and says, ‘This is My body. This is My blood.’”

Remember
the recently dead founder of a famous religious order? He was leading a double
life. He was the sainted founder of an enthusiastic religious community. He was
the friend of popes and presidents, an inspiration to all, that is until his
illegitimate children started coming out of the woodwork as did some of his
very special friends.He never believed
a word of this, but it was a paying job that allowed him to control the lives
of thousands and pay for his double life, his houses his girlfriends,
boyfriends and fairly numerous offspring.

I
had a teacher who was not quite so corrupt, but he never really believed in the
more sensational claims of the faith. He had a philosophical belief in
morality, of a sort, and taught us seminarians how to think our way around the
strict rules and ridiculous superstitions of Catholicism. He seems to have
admitted on his deathbed that he really didn’t believe in eternal life or
resurrection or all that stuff. He never believed and he taught us to believe
half- heartedly. We in turn have taught the people of God to believe only
minimally.

The
above mentioned founder and the theologian were at least honest liars. They may
have lied to us, but they weren’t lying to themselves.A lot of us practitioners of religion
convince ourselves that we believe these things when we really do not. We think
of them as useful symbols for moral behavior. We can’t convince others of the
truth of these things, because we are not sure they’re true. We can’t win
others to the Gospel of Christ with the joy of our salvation, because we are
not really sure that we ever needed saving in the first place. Our religion is
quite convenient, but rather joyless, and certainly not very demanding.

So,
Father (or deacon or sister or religion teacher or chancery worker or parish
secretary or janitor) stop kidding yourself, but don’t despair either. There is
a step two. A friend of mine was told by a priest that he, the priest, thought
he had lost his faith. My friend simply asked him, “When did you stop praying,
father?”All this relic kissing, virgin
birthing and rising from the dead is rather implausible. I only think it’s true
because Jesus tells me it’s true. And I can trust Jesus whom I meet in prayer.

So,
Step 2: Ask the Lord to let you know and love Him so that you might really
serve Him. If once you knew Him and have lost Him, ask him for His friendship
once again. I really can’t think of any reason to believe all this stuff, other
than Jesus, and I certainly can’t imagine being a priest except for Jesus’
sake.

Friday, December 19, 2014

I
unfortunately stumbled across your last incoherent and un-scholarly article
about the reality of the Christmas story. It simply leads me to think that you
are a Neanderthal with no real in-depth understanding of Scripture. I am a tenured
professor of Scriptural Deconstruction at the Hackenbush Institute of
Threebingen University in Verwirrt am Sumpf, Lower Lichtenstein, where we have
continued to develop the work of Reformation theologian Hans Von Unmoeglich,
and his theory of “Sola Scriptura, Sola
Securum Stipendium.” If you ever picked up a scholarly book more involved
than the Sunday Funnies, you might have the makings of a real scholar!

Yours,

Professor
Jurgend Von Schnickelfritz, D.Min, S.S.D., B.Y.O.B.

Dear
Professor Von Schnickelfritz,

I
was educated in the thought of Hans Von Unmoeglich in my seminary daze, I mean
days, as were most people of our generation, but my thinking changed when I
made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see exactly where all the things we
believe in didn’t happen. There I met an Arab tour guide. Until that time I had
been rather dismissive of Arab tour guides who were happy to show you the stone
for want of which Jesus had no place to lay his head and the inn where the
parable of the good Samaritan would have happened if it had not been a parable.

The
Arabs are not, well, Northern European. How could they be as jaded and
sophisticated as are we? This guide was different. He was Catholic and his
English was excellent. I discovered that he was a teacher of History and
English who had graduated from the University of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He
was, like most Palestinian Christians I have since met, very civilized,
courteous and intelligent. Their ancestors were actually bathing regularly when
our Teutonic ancestors were still painting themselves blue and running naked
through the forest with pointy sticks. He completely changed my view of
history. He explained oral tradition in a way that I had never heard it
explained. He used a very homespun example of how oral tradition works. He
recalled the time that his grandfather showed him a particular tree in a
particular field where that grandfather’s grandfather had proposed to his soon
to be wife.

It
became clear to me that Middle Eastern people value their families in a way
that you and I in the West do not. The old stories are important to them
because of the people they love. If a story was important to my grandfather, it
is important to me, and if it is important to me it will be important to my
grandchildren with whom I will carefully share it.

I
heard a similar story from Cardinal Francis George, who is a real scholar, and
has a very precise mind. He told us about his grandmother who shared stories
that her grandmother had told her about what it was like to be a Catholic on
the Kentucky frontier around 1812. They had no priests, but that didn’t stop
them from coming together on Sunday, reading the scriptures of the day and
saying the Rosary, all this to be followed by a time of food and fellowship.
That’s more than 200 years before the date of this writing.

Accurate
memories of important things can endure for centuries if they are about
memories of those who are dear to us. Accurate tradition is the result of love,
which is often in short supply among tenured professors. Hence, some of them
fail to value or even understand tradition. Professor Martin Luther of
Wittenberg University who developed the principle of “Sola Scriptura” is a fine example of the disconnect that has
created modern Biblical scholarship. Martin and his parents had a rough time of
it. Luther remembered that, “For the sake of stealing a nut, my mother once
beat me until the blood flowed”, and “...my father once whipped me so hard I
ran away.” Perhaps if the Luther family had enjoyed the occasional family game
night, things might have been a little more peaceful in Europe for the next
five centuries.

Modern
Scripture study seems sometimes to accept the “sola scriptura” principle rather uncritically.In my education, it was an unnoticed assumption.
If someone had studied in a German university they were thought automatically
brilliant whether or not we could understand a thing they were saying. (An
aside: One particular professor came back from Tubingen and wrote hymns
embodying the latest biblical theology, things about the empty tomb and the
doubts that plagued him. We were forced to learn them and sing them at Mass. We
called these dreary songs the “Dead Sea Chanties.” He left the business of
religion about a year after he arrived at my seminary. We were a surly and
rather difficult bunch of adolescents.)

The principle of Sola Scriptura is unworkable when it looks only at the text in
order to understand the text, even if it is clothed in scholarly language.

Some
scholars are fond of saying that the story of Jesus’ birth and death are just
tired reworkings of old myths such as Adonis and Isis and Mithras. There is a
difference. Jesus and his birth, death and resurrection are not “once upon time”
or “in a land far away.” They happened in the places and times that were
remembered well by their families and friends. The children of the first
followers of Jesus were more than able to share the stories accurately with the
first Christian scholars such as Justin Martyr.

“But
when the Child was born in Bethlehem, since Joseph could not find lodging in
that village, he took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village; and
while they were there Mary brought forth the Christ and placed Him in a manger,
and here the Magi who came from Arabia found Him… those who presided over the
mysteries of Mithras were stirred up by the devil to say that in a place,
called among them a cave, they were initiated by him.” (Justin. Dialogue with
Trypho, Chapters LXX and LXXVIII).

Justin
Martyr is asserting quite the opposite of what some modern scholars assert. It
was the pagan Mithraist myths that imitate the Gospel!

And
who was Justin Martyr? He was a Greek or perhaps Roman scholar who was born
about 100AD in Nablus in the Holy Land. Nablus is about 35 miles from Bethlehem.After his conversion to Christianity from
Platonism Justin set about reconciling the details of the Gospels. He did
research, and remember that he lived only a strenuous day’s walk from Bethlehem
and one long lifetime after the death and resurrection of Jesus. He was
researching things that had happened less than a century before his time and
less than a day away from where he grew up. He spoke of the Magi, the cave at
Bethlehem and all these things that we associate with the Christmas story, and he
was so convinced of the reality of these things that he was willing to die for
them, which he ultimately did. He travelled to Rome to establish a school of
philosophy and there he was beheaded in around 165 AD for refusing to deny
Christ. It wasn’t only the stories of the Bible that he believed to be true.

"And this food is called among us the
Eucharist ... For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but
in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word
of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been
taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which
our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of
that Jesus who was made flesh."

He
believed that the flesh born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem was no different
than the Flesh and Blood we receive at Mass. He believed strongly enough to
lose his tenured teaching position along with his head. I would say that his
opinions are a bit more valuable than that of any scholars who think themselves
his intellectual superior.

Friday, December 12, 2014

I just saw a TV program that said the whole Bethlehem story
was made up and that Christmas is celebrated on December 25th because it was a
way for the Church to keep people from enjoying the ancient Roman Saturnalia
feast and they put Jesus’ birthday on December 25th because it was the winter
solstice when the ancient Romans celebrated the feast of the Unconquered Sun.
Is all this true? It must be true because I saw it on television.

Yours truly,

Virginia Schwarzpeter

No, Virginia.

All this is hogwash and balderdash. Saturnalia was a feast
in honor of the god Saturn and was originally celebrated on December 17th. It
expanded over the years to the 23rd, the feast of the Sigillaria. Saturnalia
was a kind of feast of fools. In the 400’s (AD) an ancient Christian author,
Macrobius, tells us a little about the feast. “The head slave of the household,
whose responsibility it was to offer sacrifice to the household gods, to manage
the provisions and to direct the activities of the domestic servants, came to
tell his master that the household slaves had feasted according to the annual
custom. For at this festival, in houses that keep to proper religious usage,
they first of all honor the slaves with a dinner prepared as if for the master;
and only afterwards is the table set again for the head of the household. So,
then, the chief slave came in to announce the time of dinner and to summon the
masters to the table.”

It was a wild time of the year. Everything was upside down.
The ancient Romans disapproved of gambling and couldn’t get enough of it.
Slaves were certainly not allowed to gamble. Yet on the Saturnalia, everyone
gambled and slaves were allowed to gamble with their masters! Banquets were
held and a lord of misrule was appointed who could order people to do
outrageous things and who had to be obeyed. Gluttony and drunkenness were the
rule for all. It sure sounds like a modern Christmas to me! Saturnalia even had
its Grinches. Pliny the Younger, an aristocratic intellectual, went to his country
retreat during the Saturnalia. It was just too noisy for him. “(I go to my
villa at Laurentum) especially during the Saturnalia when the rest of the house
is noisy with the license of the holiday and festive cries. This way I don't
hamper the games of my people and they don't hinder my work or studies.”Sounds like a real Scrooge.

Eventually this feast was extended to the Sigillaria on
December 23rd. Sigillaria was a feast dedicated to gift giving. Little wax or
clay dolls were exchanged, rather like greeting cards. Gift giving seems to
have gotten out of hand as it always does. The feast was originally a throwing
off of social status and expensive gifts would add the element of social class
back to the feast, so simple gifts were usually given like the little wax dolls
or gag gifts. Children received toys and simple things like writing tablets as
gifts. (That sounds more like Hanukah than Christmas. I have heard Hanukah
described as a celebration of socks and school supplies.)

I don’t know. It sure sounds like Christmas to me. Wait a
minute!Christmas among the early
Christians was not celebrated with the giving of gifts, and certainly not with
drunkenness and gluttony.Giving was
more associated with the feast of St. Nicholas and perhaps with the Epiphany
when the gifts of the magi to the Christ child were remembered. Dec. 25th was
Mass. Hence the name, Christ-Mass.

Well, what about the feast of Sol Invictus and the winter
solstice, the shortest day of the year?It is true that in the old Julian calendar the 25th of December was the
shortest day of the year, but this was not associated with the feast of the
unconquered sun until the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate who tried to
establish the feast of the unconquered sun on December 25th as a sort of pagan
anti-Christmas.

In other words, it was just the opposite of what your TV show
claimed. Christians weren’t celebrating Christmas on the 25th to distract
believers from the Saturnalia or the feast of the unconquered sun. Pagans were
trying to distract themselves from Christmas which was already well entrenched
by the fourth century after Christ.

So why did the Christians celebrate the birth of Christ on
the 25th of December? Simple — because in certain places they celebrated the
death of Christ on March 25. March 25th was celebrated and still is celebrated
as the feast of the Annunciation on which the angel Gabriel told our Blessed
Mother that she would be the mother of the Son of God. They celebrated the
Annunciation, the Incarnation, when the Word was flesh and dwelt among us on
the 25th of March, because that is when they believed Christ had been
crucified.

In the Hebrew calendar, that date was the 14th of Nissan. It
was the anniversary of the first Passover, the Exodus and of the creation of
the world. It was always thought that a prophet died on the anniversary of his
conception and so, Jesus dying on the Passover, meant that he would have been
conceived on the Passover and thus born nine months after Passover, the 25th
day of December on the ancient Roman calendar.

A further problem is that calendars were not coordinated in
the ancient world. The Roman calendar had gone wildly of the tracks so that the
beginning of summer might be sometime in fall. You didn’t know if it was today
or half past three days from now. The 14th of Nisan was constantly
re-calibrated according to the cycles of the moon and the sun and nobody quite
knew what day it was when they compared calendars. Days of the week are a
Jewish/Babylonian invention. Romans had ides and calends dividing their
incomprehensible months into sort of double weeks of fourteen or fifteen days.
Throw in the Egyptian calendars of which there were a few and the whole thing
becomes an irretrievable mess.

So, it makes great sense to celebrate the birth of Christ on
the 25th of December. It is quite possibly the time around which He was born,
at least according to some early authors and it has great symbolic meaning in
the sense of the Hebrew Scriptures. It has nothing to do with a Roman feast.

What about the scholars who say that there was journey to
Bethlehem and that part of the story was thrown in just to make the prophecy
about the messiah being born in Bethlehem come true? All I know is that the
Christian author St. Justin Martyr (100 – 165 AD), a Palestinian Christian,
said in his Dialogue with Trypho that the Holy Family stayed in a cave outside
of Bethlehem. So, from the first days, Bethlehem and its cave were venerated
and are still venerated to this day as the site of Christ’s birth.

In 135 AD, the Emperor Hadrian built a shrine and planted a
sacred grove of trees at the site venerated by the first Christians of the Holy
Land in order to obliterate the memory of Christ there, just as he built a
pagan temple over the site of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher. He sure went to a
lot of trouble to obliterate nothing if there was nothing there in the first
place.

Once again, Virginia, I remind you not to get your religion
from TV. I am always amused that the pundits of our enlightened time know so
much more two thousand years andten
thousand miles distant from the actual events than do people who lived there a
century after the fact. They hate us and always will. Bad mouthing Christians
makes for good entertainment, just as did when they used to throw us to the
lions in the Roman amphitheaters.

It strikes me as humorous that we now celebrate Christmas
beginning in November and by December 17th we are in full swing.By December 25 we are so sick of Christmas
that we can’t wait to get the tree down. It seems that the world really has
decided to celebrate the drunken, gluttonous, gift-giving-gone-wild holiday of
the Saturnalia, so let me ask you Virginia, which one are you going to
celebrate this year?

Friday, December 5, 2014

Can you recommend a good
Catholic University?Little Leroy has
finally decided to leave home. He is only 53 and has never been away from home,
and so of course we want send him to a good Catholic College where he will be
safe and his brain will not be fried by strange new ideas.

Yours,

Louie and Alma M.
Whiffenpoof

Dear Mr. and Mrs.
Whiffenpoof,

My sainted mother always
said if you haven’t anything good to say then say nothing at all.(Imagine the sound of crickets
chirping)……………………As for new ideas? Very few Catholic institutions of higher
learning, so called, have had a new idea since 1965.

I remember my college days
at Crayola University here in Frostbite Falls.I took a philosophy course offered by Dr. Siegfried Hansen. He said, “Zuh
great Kvestion of 20th zenchury philosophy…” In English that is “The great
question of 20th century philosophy is….. ‘Why is there something instead of
nothing?’”

I raised my hand and said
“Because there is no nothing! Nothing cannot 'be' by definition.”To which he responded, “Wrong!”and continued his lecture pacing back and
forth expounding in a soothing monotone. I dropped that class like a bad habit.

In our times education has
gone from bad to worse in most places, especially in the liberal arts. I know.
I am an aging hippie who taught at a university for 25 years. Don’t ask
questions. We young radicals asked the questions and figured out the right
answers that our parents and teachers were hiding from us. You young folks
don’t have to ask any questions. We tenured revolutionaries will tell you what
to believe.

I have just heard a
wonderful example of this enlightened attitude that I and my Aquarian generation
have tried to instill in younger minds, now middle-aged, who are teaching minds
yet younger than they how to petrify their own brains.

“We had a discussion on all of them – except
gay rights,” reported the student.“She
erased that line from the board and said, ‘We all agree on this.’”

End of discussion.

After class he told the
teacher that he thought they should have included the issue of gay rights. Long
story short, she told him that, “You can have whatever opinions you want but I
will tell you right now – in this class homophobic comments, racist comments,
sexist comments will not be tolerated,” she said. ‘If you don’t like it, you
are more than free to drop this class.” The student dropped the class.

“I understand that other
people have very different views than I do and that’s understandable, but when
a student is not allowed to have an open discussion in a discussion-type class
on a specific issue because it’s regarded as homophobic – that really irks me,”
said the student.

The teacher defined ethical
behavior in such a way as to restrict speech in a university classroom, a
Catholic University classroom. Years ago I wrote an article about the
transvestite beauty contest at DePeter University, a local Frostbite Falls
Catholic University. The event was featured on the front page of the student
newspaper. The gala event ended with a drag ball in one of the university
dormitories on campus. The president of the school called me upset, not that I
had questioned the wisdom of having such an event at a Catholic University, but
that I had made the event public and upset one of his donors. It was not
important to the reverend father that he was raising funds under false
pretenses nor that he was allowing behavior inappropriate to life at a Catholic
institution. He was simply upset by the bad publicity. The most astonishing
part of my conversation was that he insisted that he could do nothing about it,
neither the full-color full cover picture of a very scrawny boy in a wig, makeup
and a rather skimpy women’s bikini bathing suit, nor the transvestite dance in
a university-owned dorm, because of (get this) academic freedom.

I don’t know if DePeter
University still has the transvestite beauty contest and drag ball, but they do
now offer a minor in queer studies. I wonder if the reasons for Catholic
teaching about same-sex teaching are highlighted and clearly explained in this
bold, new academic department. (By the way I am not making any of this up,
except for the name of the school, whose real name I bet you could never
guess.)

This, I believe, is the
heart of the matter. Academic freedom in some places means the freedom to
discuss only what the new pseudo-orthodoxy demands. The same academic freedom
that allows behavior which for two thousand years has been thought contrary to
the Gospel prohibits discussion of what has been perceived for the same twenty
centuries as the obvious meaning of the Gospel.

This is crazy. To say that
the academic freedom permits boys to think they are girls but forbids other
boys to say they think that is bizarre. It is just as bizarre as saying that
sex has nothing to do with the birth of children; just as bizarre as saying
hormone shots and mutilation will turn a man into a woman or vice versa; just
as bizarre as pretending that ejecting a student with a varying opinion from
class is a form of tolerance.

If you look at human
physiology, the nature of gender is quite clear. If you look at the political
correctness of our time and the convoluted definition of academic freedom that
forbids students to express the teachings of the Church in a Catholic
university philosophy course in this age of new-speak tolerance, it is clear
that we are a religious culture that has lost its mind and lost its way. We no
longer have the right to call ourselves Catholic — that is universal — because
we have cut ourselves off from those who have gone before. We live only in the
present age, not the past and the future. Unlike our Lord, we are no longer the
same “yesterday, today and tomorrow.” We are just a fad. We may be modern, but
we can no longer claim to embrace the fullness of humanity.We cease to be Catholic in the most basic
sense.

Human beings have
experienced sexual dysfunction since Adam and Eve left the garden, but as far
as I know this is the first generation to define dysfunction as normal. The
only people not welcome in church are those who have not sinned and thus have
no need of a savior. People with their moral shortcoming and their disordered
appetites are welcome in the church; the embrace of Christ extends to all,
except to those who say I have not sinned. For a Catholic sin is not the
greatest problem. The greatest problem is a refusal to recognize sin in
oneself. This kind of pride is called hubris and it invites disaster.

This aging hippie recalls an
old Bob Dylan song from 50 years ago “A hard rain’s a gonna’ fall.”

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).